The girl who inspired Morpurgo
Author Michael Morpurgo inspired by extraordinary survival story of Amber Owen for his latest hit
IT HAS been 12 years since the British schoolgirl was saved from a devastating tsunami by an elephant, which carried her to safety in one of the most remarkable stories of animal instinct ever reported.
Amber Owen, 20, will now be able to see her extraordinary experience brought to life in the London theatre, after Michael Morpurgo, the children’s author, unexpectedly used it as inspiration for his latest hit.
Morpurgo, the creator of War Horse, and Miss Owen have not previously met but will now do so at a performance of Running Wild at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.
Miss Owen, who works in fashion and lives in Milton Keynes, said she had previously been told by friends that her story had inspired a children’s book, but had never managed to trace who had written it.
Morpurgo recalled reading a small article about Miss Owen in 2004, but had forgotten enough of the details that he had never traced her in real life. The adaptation of his novel, which will run until June 12, is told by a cast of children and puppet animals.
Miss Owen was on holiday in Phuket with her mother, Samantha, and stepfather Eddie, in 2004 when she visited her favourite local tame elephant for a ride and to feed it bananas.
But while riding Ning Nong along the beach, the eight-year-old noticed the elephant was attempting to pull away from the receding seawater. “Peo- ple were going into the sea to pick up fish, but the elephant kept trying to get away,” she told The Daily Telegraph.
“I didn’t know what a tsunami was, but he could clearly sense there was danger. He ran away, and as the water came in I was safely on his back. He saved my life.”
At the time, her mother described hysterically screaming before she found her daughter on the elephant’s back, and pledged to donate to its upkeep every year as a mark of gratitude.
Morpurgo said: “I read that story and I thought to myself, this is extraordinary.”
He wrote Running Wild in 2009. After an interview with Morpurgo, The
Daily Telegraph tracked down Miss Owen. Morpurgo has now extended an invitation to her and her family to see the show, which Miss Owen said she would “love” to accept.
Morpurgo called the discovery “terrific”, remarking “what fun it will be for her to see the show with us after all this time”.
After a run at the Chichester Festival Theatre, the play has transferred to London, to be staged in the open air, surrounded by trees and the noises of nearby London Zoo.
It will use the puppetry designers behind the world-renowned production of War Horse to bring the elephants and orang-utans to life.
‘The elephant could clearly sense danger. He ran away, and as the water came in I was safely on his back’
Michael Morpurgo’s drama of a little child saved from a tsunami by a companionable elephant is, by all accounts, a gripping and emotional story – all the more, perhaps, because it is based on a true tale. A notable aspect of the play, now in performance outdoors at Regent’s Park, is the success of the life-size puppets – elephants and orang-outans. This follows on from the remarkable experience for thousands of theatre-goers since 2007 of seeing the puppetry in War Horse. It wasn’t that audiences had to learn to pretend that the horses (with puppeteers in plain sight) were real. Suspension of disbelief came naturally. It made the play such a proud hit for the National Theatre that it seemed only right during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee river pageant that, as her barge passed the brutalist concrete facade of the theatre, a rearing horse operated by puppeteers saluted the vessel.
There is a paradox here. As computer-generated imagery has become so realistic in films that it matches the make-believe quality of the human actors, so audiences have discovered that this was hardly what they sought in the first place. After all, a play is obviously not the real world, for playgoers can see each other and the stage on which the actors stand for an hour or two. Yet the theatre often has more power to move than the most verisimilitudinous film. At heart, human beings do not seek virtual reality but a kind of story-telling in which their imaginations do the work of making it all seem true. This is good news for traditions like Punch and Judy, shadow-puppetry or marionettes. Muffin the Mule’s strings or Thunderbirds’ clunkiness were no obstacles to their popularity. Now puppetry on a bigger scale has proved it can expand the narrative power of the theatre.